CUDACasts Episode 17: Unstructured Data Lifetimes in OpenACC 2.0

The OpenACC 2.0 specification focuses on increasing programmer productivity by addressing limitations of OpenACC 1.0. Previously, programmers were required to use structured code blocks to control when to transfer data to or from the device, which limited the applications that could quickly be accelerated without major code restructuring. It also prevented adding OpenACC directives to handle data movement in the constructors and destructors of C++ classes.

OpenACC 2.0 provides unstructured data lifetime pragmas to make it easier to instruct the compiler to transfer data most efficiently. In today’s CUDACast, I will cover three unstructured data lifetime methods within a single piece of code. Because the example code is fairly long, I’ve uploaded the source to GitHub for you to look at.

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About Mark Ebersole

As CUDA Educator at NVIDIA, Mark Ebersole teaches developers and programmers about the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model, and the benefits of GPU computing. With more than ten years of experience as a low-level systems programmer, Mark has spent much of his time at NVIDIA as a GPU systems diagnostics programmer in which he developed a tool to test, debug, validate, and verify GPUs from pre-emulation through bringup and into production. Before joining NVIDIA, he worked for IBM developing Linux drivers for the IBM iSeries server. Mark holds a BS degree in math and computer science from St. Cloud State University. Follow @cudahamster on Twitter